Unanswered Questions
by eoraptor
Summary: What does the world do when a heroine falls? How do people react to tragedy? Who bears responsibility? ONESHOT


"_**Unanswered Questions"**_

By Eoraptor

**Boring but important legal stuff**: Kim Possible and all related characters are property of the Walt Disney Corporation ©2002-2007. Redistribution of this text for profit or without the author's consent is prohibited.

**More boring but important stuff**: This publication is rated by the author as **T for Teen** for violence and adult themes. If you can't handle this type of material or it is illegal where you are located, don't complain to me or the site admin this document is posted on, JUST DON'T READ IT!

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Shego glared at the sympathy card hard enough that, were she to blink wrong, it would combust.

They had trickled over a month or so; a dozen odd condolences and sympathy epistles. Mainly from supervillains who knew what it was like to lose a nemesis, but also a few from her fanboys, people whom admired her for one reason or another and couldn't be dissuaded, even through a good beating.

And then this one, from Miriam Viable. At first, Shego had simply thrown it on the pile. Maybe Miriam had been someone who had interviewed her in those hectic days after the conference at the U.N. or possibly she was someone from Go City Shego had once saved when she was a hero. "Whateves."

After a few weeks of sulking by herself, following Possible's death and all of the ramifications which had come from it and had kept her at least a little busy, Shego had gotten around to sending her thank-you notes. It was a practice drilled into her by her maternal grandmother, and perhaps her only redeeming feature. So once she had managed to track down Dementor's latest hideout to send him a thank-you card for the sausage tray, she had picked up the note from Miriam to figure out who was left to thank for their sympathies.

When first she saw there was no return address, and that the letter had passed through New York, one of the busiest post offices in the nation if not the world; the retired mercenary had reluctantly accepted that she could not remit her appreciation. Still, the card itself was pretty; a small red-crested cardinal in snow painting on the front and a nice, embossed script inside. So she did not throw it away immediately. It added a bit of color to her otherwise austere black-and-crème decor.

It was a decision she was coming to regret. The damned card, taped up to her nice new gloss black refrigerator was haunting her. Every time she passed it now, it tried to convince her that she knew whom had sent it; the colorful red-headed black and white bird looking meaningfully at her. When she would open it up and look at the script inside, the signature in ink, she could just sense familiarity about it. Eventually, even the scotch tape began to mock her, allowing the card to be held slightly open where it clung to the fridge in her new condo.

The first few internet searches on the name "Miriam Viable" turned up exactly nothing. That piqued her interest. Even newborn babies had a presence on the internet through public records and birth announcements. After a few more days of the sympathy card mocking her from the fridge, Shego tried again. This time she got one or two cyber-nibbles, in Canada. Still, nothing conclusive. It was just a phone book entry and the list of some faceless nobody (not pictured) from some community playhouse in Amqui in Quebec.

A few days later, after some aimless debauchery and base physical pleasure, Shego checked back since it was the only lead she had, and it lined up at least tangentially with the sympathy card being from New York. This time there was a picture, albeit a black-and-white newspaper scan. Miriam was a nondescript apparently brunette woman with a roundish face and flippy hair.

"Well shit!" The mercenary almost incinerated the computer.

Miriam was no one she recognized, it seemed.

Still, for the next week or so, Shego kept returning to the playhouse website. Kept staring at the gray image of Miriam Viable. The more she stared at it, the more her attention was drawn to the eyes. For some French-Canadian who merely belonged to some community theater in a river-town, Miriam had the most piercing stare.

After several more days of upping the playhouse's hit counter and glaring at the picture, she snorted and shook her head at herself, closing the browser.

There was just nothing else for it. She was going to have to go and find some answers from this little croquette. Unfortunately, heading to the great white north proved more troublesome than she had first thought.

It seemed the Canadians were still nursing something of a grudge over the few times Drakken had attempted to take over their tree and French infested land. They sent her home at the border with an IMM 5292 form and told her not to come back.

Apparently the Mounties thought a piece of paper was enough to stop the great and powerful Shego from crossing an imaginary line on a map. It only took a few thousand dollars to get passage on a freighter heading up the seaway from St. Cathrines, New York into Canada. From there, it was no problem to go ashore, claim she had lost her entry papers, rent a car, and head to Amqui.

Still, the two day boat ride gave her time to reminisce. Much like JFK, The Moon Landing, The Challenger explosion, and 9/11, "Where were you the day Kim Possible died" had become a cultural touch stone in only a year or so.

Shego had been in a hot tub, with two pretty boys she had picked up at a UMA tournament for some play time. Then the jockey on the radio had broken in with the news. Fortunately the boy toys had gotten out of the hot tub before the water actually reached a boil.

At first, Shego, like many, had assumed that it was incorrect a bad report by an over eager twitter twat that caught the news. That it must be some other redheaded heroine sent to stop a rampaging Lorwardian robotank. And then, the next theory, for both herself and others, was that it was a ruse. Some villain had kidnapped Kim under the guise of the rampaging alien walker and was holding her somewhere remote.

The Doofus certainly hoped so. Drakken, not so much. Especially since he was legit, and didn't take kindly to being beaten about the head and neck by either metahuman in alternating bursts of blue and green. Finally, bloody and nearly unable to speak, he had convinced them that if anyone had the redhead, it wasn't him.

This went on for quite some time while Shego was receiving her sympathy cards. And it wasn't just her. Every two bit dictator, supervillain, and rival mercenary was under suspicion by everyone else. Global Justice raided WEE, the Seniors, and Team Impossible's latest Op Cen. The Seniors, in turn, funded raids on The Fashionista's, Dementor, and Drakken, again. Drakken then ran his own mission against Global Justice with an army of uprated synthodrones he had been building for the Brits.

Ron, in addition to attacking Drakken, turned on some place in Japan that Shego had never heard of, nor could pronounce. He also went after something called the order of the Yono, who were new players working for DNAmy. Those bunch of sick, mutated bastards set Shego's teeth on edge, and she almost decided to eliminate them on principal.

But eventually things died down. Shego eventually tracked down the S.C.I. guy who had found Kimmie's… remains… in Nevada. He had been put into witness protection immediately after news of Kim's death hit and Shego and Ron went after Drakken. After a few hours spent… interviewing him, Shego was convinced.

While a Body was never recovered, the evidence she was finally given by the S.C.I. guy and his US Marshall handlers couldn't be faked. Even though there was no corpse, there was more than enough blood, and worse, grey matter, to indicate that there certainly was one, even if it was nothing more than smears on the bottom of the scuttler's foot-spikes.

Shego, for one, decided to leave it at that, and passed on what she knew to those who she felt could and would desire the information.

It left a… strange… sensation in her. To know that Kim Possible was dead.

The best she could describe it was as an emptiness. She and Kim were hardly friends. They spent time trying to spite one another still, whenever they crossed paths; wicked, almost venomous barbs hurled at each other. And yet, they were not enemies any more, either. The world no long hung in the balance when they argued, and Shego had not committed any crimes greater than speeding or double parking until this very week.

Well okay, she had committed some acts of Sodomy, but that was purely jurisdictional.

Being retired from hard core villainy had been change enough for her, knowing she couldn't go back to trying to rule the world after giving it away to the UN and all that. That was change enough for one lifetime. Going from good, to evil, to in-between.

This new, numb, empty feeling was just too fucking much. It wasn't like she was crying her eyes out over the teen taken too early from life. She'd seen her share of senseless tragedy over the years to scream to the heavens for a "why." And likewise, she was not toasting the demise of a hated foe and plotting her next great move in the absence of real resistance. Granny said never speak ill of the dead lest they decide to haunt you.

It was just, most mornings, when she woke up, there was this anticipation of what the day would bring for her. And then she would remember there was no Kim Possible. And her day seemed a bit more dull. It didn't matter that she had no plans to hire herself out to the next in a list of mad men filling her email box. There was no Kim Possible waiting to stop her, or worse, try to talk her down. And if the Aliens came back, or Drakken got back into the game? There was no Kim Possible to save them all and then give them back their pretty little world to play nicely in.

There was another thought. It was one, in the first few weeks, which had kept Shego and many others in the world up at night. If Kim hadn't been killed, and if no villain was holding her, had she gone over?

Honestly, it scared Shego shitless when it had first been suggested. She and Kim were a lot alike. Both wildly intelligent, both powerful and well connected, both charismatic and domineering. Shego could easily have taken the world herself if she wanted to. But frankly, she was lazy, and it was sorta fun pointing out the flaws in others. Kim, on the other hand, had an inhuman amount of drive and determination. It was like her freaking super-power or something. If Kim had gone over… well, she may as well get in touch with the Lorwardian's and see if she could get a permanent resident visa on Lorwardia Ultima, because the Earth was right fucked.

But, again, she had been given the final evidence of Kim's status. And what she had learned was eventually leaked to the rest of the world. There were still a few crackpot conspiracy theorists out there claiming Kim was living in rural China with Elvis and Lady Di and running a noodle stand, but the rest of the world was coming to expect that their pretty-in-pink hero was gone.

And this quest to locate and confront Miriam Viable was the best thing she had to spend her time on now.

It was with that thought that Shego arrived outside Théâtre de l'esprit and set up camp. It was the only lead she had on Viable, since the phone book record was for a cell phone and thus had no address publically attached to it. While sitting in her car, Shego smacked herself in the forehead. She could easily, she suddenly realized, have hired any number of hackers to backtrack the number and get her billing addresses and other phone weirdo Canadian numbers dialed.

"Oh well…" She muttered into her steering wheel and sighed, "This is more fun anyway."

Finally, after realizing sitting around outside a small community playhouse theater for hours was probably a stupid way to find Miriam when she could just contact the local police, Shego's stakeout purgatory was rewarded when people started showing up for what must be a rehearsal. While she didn't immediately see anyone who matched the photo of Miriam, it was a slightly chilly evening, and three of the females were wearing hats or hoodies that prevented her immediately identifying them yea or nay.

Calling on skills that had lain dormant for months, Shego quickly found a way into the playhouse unnoticed. The fact that she wasn't in her catsuit complicated matters slightly, but only slightly; she only ripped her blouse once on a ventilation shaft.

Once inside, she looked around. Everyone who had been hidden had shed their hats and coats… except for one person. Shego arched a brow slightly. That girl was wearing a hoodie over her head. It was a familiar pruple. Maddog Pruple.

That color had become so popular after the invasion, and after two graduated classmates of Kim Possible had done a photo spread in Playpen of course.

Sighing, and shaking off an unbidden memory, Shego moved back into the back of the audience area. She watched "Hoodie" and the other players rehearsing some play about New York mobster's and cross-dressing that she had virtually no interest in. Within just a minute she had ruled out the other two hatted players as being Miriam Viable, but she was still no closer to knowing who this woman was. She certainly didn't give off the air of being a rabid "Shego" fangirl, and she was not anyone who had interviewed Shego either, nor did her accent mark her as being from Go City. It was plain, unaffected Midwestern North American.

Not even French Canadian. Shego muttered to herself, suddenly wondering what she was doing here. A pointless card from someone she didn't know and she had violated international law to get here. Feh, what a waste of a couple grand.

Then Miriam lowered her hood. Yup, brunette, with medium dark skin… and green eyes that pierced Shego.

"What… the… hell…?" Shego leaned forward, frowning and staring intently. The hair was wrong, too long, and the pigment was wrong, too dark.

But the shape of the face… and the eyes?

After a moment, Shego flopped back into her seat. Obviously she was screwed up with boredom and that empty listless feeling. Unless this was Kim's latina cousin, this girl merely happened to look a lot like a dead heroine. Even from here, her keen theif's eye could tell that it was no spray on tan, and it was too late in the year to be that of a sun worshipper. Besides, Possible was a redhead, she wouldn't tan like that without some kind of genetic manipulation.

And, Kim Possible was dead. Brain matter didn't lie, nor did enough blood to paint a small room. And Viable certainly didn't look to be wearing a wig, nor have any suspicious indentations in her Possible-shaped skull to indicate she had taken any brain spattering blows to the head recently.

Shego was about to rise to her feet, leave Théâtre de l'esprit and Canada, and count this all up to boredom and misadventure when a spotlight snapped its moorings and dropped to the floor. It punched clean through the stage floor, into the pit below the stage, and raised an awful racket along with several spears of broken wood.

But Shego didn't notice that. Her eyes were locked on Miriam Viable.

The stage actress, before the lamp had even impacted the hardwood, had back flipped twice to get out of the way, and pulled her co-star along with her.

Now this… this bore further investigation.

She got out of Théâtre de l'esprit even more easily than she got in, avoiding the jagged bits of ventilation duct and the dusty spots. She felt more… alive than she had in months. The detective that dwelled deep within her, the hero of Team Go, the instinct that she had twisted slowly into the thief, was twitching, firing, itching to explore.

She called a hacker she knew, one who worked fast, and at least moderately cheaply. Within the hour, she had the address she had neglected to look into earlier. It was an apartment above a corner store, modest, but with a very decent view of the river and Lake Matapedia beyond the edge of town. Shego learned all this within five minutes of slipping in through the unlocked fire escape window.

However, within the next five minutes, she was beginning to doubt herself. As Miss Go, she had fairly clear memories of most of Kim's possessions, treasured mementos, and habits. Nothing here really screamed "Teen Heroine Kim Possible" to her.

No pink cami half-out of the hamper in the corner. No Oh Boyz and Britina Posters, autographed or otherwise, on the walls. Definitely no threadbear Pandaroo. There was also no rice in the cupboards, which she knew the carbo-loading cheerleader favoured. And only a few noodles and potatoes.

Shego sighed, and rolled her eyes. What the hell had she been thinking? Some weirdo, who may not even be the Miriam Viable who sent her the mysterious, but ultimately harmless sympathy card, happened to be able to pull off a double backflip. So what?

Hell, it wasn't like flaming plasma fires or the power to bench press a city bus! Must be hundreds of millions of people on this benighted dirt ball who could do that. She flopped onto the couch and muttered darkly to herself once more about boredom. She really needed a job. Sitting around on her ass eight days a week was making her stir crazy apparently. Heck, she had a cousin, who she knew had a kid who could pull off the whole tumbling routine.

She was so concentrated on self-pity that she almost didn't hear the door unlatch.

Almost.

By the time it actually got around to opening, though, Shego had leapt to her feet, and realizing the window was closed behind her, struck a fighting stance; prepared to fight her way out of the small apartment.

"Shego!" Miriam Viable responded by striking an opposing stance and growling.

A split-second later, she realized her mistake. She stood in the mantis blocking pose for a minute, an awkward expression on her face, before frowning, running her hand through her dark brown hair and sighing. "Well crap."

Shego, for her part, stood equally dumbfounded for a long moment. Finally, she dropped her hands, her fire evaporating as she stood up straight. Shaking her head, she looked right at Miriam Viable, and saw through the makeup, or whatever, into a dead woman's eyes.

"Hello, Cupcake. Still not locking the windows, I see."

"Fuck you, Shego."

Shego's jaw hit the floor. A second later her butt hit the couch she had been languishing on. She grinned ghoulishly at the revived Possible and sat forward as the initial wave of shock began to abate. "Wow… I guess you really did take a blow to the skull. Can I see the scar?"

Shego didn't know what happened. One moment she was grinning at Kim, the next she was on her back, the couch over-turned, and Kim astride her, her arms pinned immobile at either side, feet helplessly in up on the upset couch, unable to gain momentum to kick the former redhead off.

To top it all off, a tiger-claw was wrapped around her throat, fingertips right on her carotid. "Who else knows I am here?"

A few chokes indicated that Kim had paralyzed her target's windpipe with her grip, and after a moment the claw was eased… slightly.

From this vantage, something became disturbingly apparent. Kim's skin really was just shy of olive tan. And her hair, if it was dyed, was so impeccable that the roots didn't even hint in her eyebrows or lashes, nor did she smell of chemical pigments. Shego narrowed her eyes suspiciously, until Kim prompted her by squeezing her pulse point again.

"Alright alright! Sheesh! No one, okay?" She hissed, making a show of struggling beneath the risen heroine.

After a long moment of staring hard at her with those piercing green eyes, the heroine rolled lithely away and stood up, still facing her wearily. "Why are you here?"

Standing up, rubbing her throat, Shego glared at the altered teen. Snorting, she knelt and righted the couch with little effort, subtly demonstrating her capabilities in case the uppity Lazurus had forgotten just who had the superhuman abilities.

"You sent me a card, dork."

After another long moment of glaring at her, the darkened teen snorted, running a hand through her hair. "Knew that was a mistake. Ugh!"

"Depends…" Shego shrugged, waving around the apartment, "Now… explain."

"Explain what?" Kim growled, still eyeing Shego even as she moved around the righted couch.

"Well, you can start with the new skin and hair." She sat down, crossing one long leg over the other, and laying her hands along the back of the couch. "And we'll go from there."

"Or else what?"

"Oooh, good question, Kimmie." Shego grinned, and pursed her lips. "For starters, or else I'll go and tell Drakken you're alive and well and living in 'Drakanada'."

"You think he's going to believe you? I heard you beat him up."

"No, but he doesn't have to. He'll run his mouth about it to someone, anyone, and then this quaint little frog town of yours is gonna be inundated with Kimmie hunters."

"How do I know someone hasn't already followed you here?"

"Because I'm fucking Shego. If I don't want to be seen, I'm not seen."

Kim rolled her eyes and snorted, "Yeah, because Wade never once tracked you down."

"Kimmie, it's easy to find the one human on the planet who is green AND can make fire with their bare hands." Shego returned the eye roll. "But no one is going to identify from orbit just one more brunette sneaking across a border to go north for say… a better job. Now. Spill."

Kim sat down on the window sill Shego had come in by, and glared daggers. After a long moment, she sighed with reluctant resolve.

Holding up one tan hand, she considered it. "The skin and hair are the products of genetic modification. Part and parcel of the deal to disappear."

"Ah, so all the blood, and the brain cells?" Shego arched a brow curiously.

"Cloned and grown en masse to create the evidence that I could not have survived my 'death.' Not a perfect cloning incidentally, but good enough to stand up to all but the most anal retentive electron microscopic investigation." Kim nodded. "Amy said that the cell counts for the blood were entirely wrong, and the brain cells were utterly non-functional, but to any common forensic study, they would light up all the proper bells and whistles."

"Well they sure did. So, DNAmy huh? Why her?"

"Because she could do the job."

"But why would she?"

Kim sighed and chewed her lower lip angrily. "Payment in two parts. I gave her the location of Monkey Fist's statue shortly before the invasion. Originally I intended to have her upgrade my body with some leopard DNA so that I could keep up with you better without that janky battle suit, and incase Warmonga ever figured out the tweeb's trick and came back. But she got back faster than I counted on."

Shego simply nodded. It's exactly what she would have done were their positions reversed. "And the second part of the payment?"

"I sold out Yamanouchi after Ron screwed Yori while on 'Sabatical'." Kim spat the word and glared out the window at the lake.

"There's that word again... what the hell is this Patchouli?" scratching her head, Shego frowned.

"Yah Mah Nou Chee." Kim corrected, looking over. "It's a ninja school in the mountains of western Hokkaido. They trained Ron in his monkey powers, and that was what Monkey Fist attacked that got him stoned in the first place."

"Damn… talk about your woman scorned." Shego whistled and shook her head. "So all this is about some Asian poon tang?"

"Ha!" she barked bitterly, "If only. But you only asked about the hair and the skin. Amy did them up for me since what I asked for with the blood and tissue was so much simpler than integrating foreign DNA into my body without changing my appearance. Very good customer service, that woman. She'd make a fortune in the private clinic world if she was a little bit more sane. But then she wouldn't be as good as she is."

"Yeah, I suppose not. After all, she gave old Lord Stuffington of Crazypants working monkey hands and feet." Shego chuckled softly. "So… why dead?"

They broke for a bit as Kim straightened up the upset coffee table and got them both a beer. "It's legal here" was her response to Shego's look.

Finally, longneck heavy Canadian beer in hand, Shego resumed prodding. "So… you… dead… why?"

"You ever been anyone's personal savior Shego?"

"Yeah… duh. Retired Teen Heroine here, remember?" she rolled her eyes and took a pull from her bottle.

"Yeah, but up till eighteen months ago, you didn't save six billion of them at once. We all did then." Kim muttered bitterly. "But I'm 'Kim Possible'. So I got treated like a second coming. I couldn't so much as sneeze without someone trying to interpret it. I couldn't handle it any more. Even when I told them to stuff it, they would try to tell me what I really meant! How I was merely testing their resolve in believing in me."

"They who?" Shego's inner child therapist probed.

"Everyone! Cops, army, clergy, politicians, fundamentalists, extremists, doctors, lawyers, parents! My Parents!" Kim shouted, before getting ahold of herself. "Ron wasn't the last straw, but he led to it. He apologized all over himself, and understood when I told him to get the fuck out of my face. But then his pump tried to tell me why ~I~ had delivered him to her arms. Someone from three thousand miles away bangs my boyfriend on another continent while I am stopping Frugal Lucre from embezzling thirteen billion pennies from the world's fountains, and then tries to explain to me why it's entirely my own doing. After that, it was easy to make the decision to kill myself off."

"Least you didn't try to take over the world…" Shego muttered to herself over the lip of her beer.

"Oh believe me, I thought about it… thought about giving them all ~exactly~ what they wanted." She ranted, nursing her drink.

Shego shivered and looked up at the altered heroine. Her worst fear spoken aloud. "So…"

"I decided to toss it. It was a hinky idea at best. They spent this much time arguing about what an eighteen year old girl meant, I'd never get anything done as Empress without killing the first three rounds of underlings to get my point across." She muttered bitterly and sat her bottle down.

Shego shivered at the casualness with which this new Kim talked about the process.

"So, how does being free and clear feel?" She enquired after a moment, never having had the option herself, green skin and 42 D's didn't hide as well as irish pale and teenage titties.

"It's… not bad. But a bit of a mixed bag. There's been a few mornings where I wake up ferociously hating myself for what my family and friends have to go through… but then I see all the crap about what I meant to teenagers, what I meant to women, what I meant to Christian fundys and Muslim extremists and the American economy… and I don't feel so bad that they don't have me to kick around any more. And I have learned a lot more about myself in the last year than I did in the previous eighteen."

"Like?"

"Well, for one thing, as much as I hated it when they said it about you and me… I'm pretty sure I'm bisexual."

"Yeah, figured as much."

"Oh please, you so did not!"

"Maybe I did… Maybe I didn't. Not the point. Learn anything else, Cupcake?"

Kim just eyed Shego, not quite glaring, but not exactly looking lovingly on her either. "Whatever… Well, I'm much happier not doing everything at once. I still go stir crazy after two or three hours of sitting around, but I'm not on seven committees, three cheer squads, babysitting, getting mountain lions out of trees, and saving the world before homework and curfew…"

"So what ~are~ you doing then, Princess?"

"I work part time as an orderly at the local hospital, I volunteer with the Natural Resources board cataloging the local wildlife, and I act, like you saw tonight. It keeps me busy eighteen hours a day." She nodded, picking up her beer, taking a drink.

"And how do you pay for your life on the wages of a part time bed pan jockey?" Shego instantly picked up the hole in her little lifestyle.

"I always had money put away somewhere, Shego. I learned my lesson after the whole green coat fiasco. How do you think I paid for Ron's indestructible leather belt?" she tipped her bottle at the green woman, making her point.

"Ah, the life of someone rich enough not to care…" Shego lamented.

"I'm not fabulously wealthy Shego…" Kim corrected. She looked around the small apartment as she spoke, "I have enough money, with the income from the hospital, to live relatively comfortably by my standards."

Shego looked around and shrugged dismissively. It seemed positively Spartan by her standards and desires. She didn't get it. Still, considering the gang tackle she'd gotten a few minutes ago, it must be important enough to Kim to seriously defend.

"So… think you'll ever come back to it?" She probed after a moment.

"So not." Kim dismissed out of hand. "I'm happy here. I've got a sorta thing going with Becky at the clinic, but it's no drama, and no one is telling me who I am or am not, or what I mean to them. Now, I have a question for you, Shego?"

Shego looked up in time to see the barrel of some monster firearm trained between her eyes from seemingly nowhere. Between the size of the barrel, and the proximity to the bridge of her nose, Shego realized that she pretty much zero chance of evading without having at least one half of her skull vaporized.

"Uh… What is that, Kimmie?"

"Smith and Wesson Model 500. Don't worry, I have all the appropriate licenses. Took me most of the time I've been up here incidentally. I use it when I'm in the field to deal with bears."

"Why is it pointed at me? I am neither large, nor furry."

"No, but you are dangerous. So explain to me how you found me."

"Or you'll shoot?"

"I will. You broke into my home, and are an only semi-reformed arch criminal. It's ferociously justifiable."

Shego sighed. Kimmie had her dead to rights. "Fine… For one thing, you sent me that card. If you hadn't done that, I never would have known to look for Miriam Viable."

"Call me Mim."

"Fine." Shego growled, not in the most comfortable position to be graciously accepting with a hand canon trained on her. "I found Mim because she… you… are the only one of you to pop up. I would have written it off, except that Mim… you… whoever... Seems to be virtually nonexistent, virtually speaking."

Kim nodded. After a moment she made a small motion with the monster gun, indicating to Shego to continue.

After a terse moment, the mercenary resumed, "If you lived in Outer Mongolia or eastern Markovia, I probably would still have written it off, but you live in the western world. There was no way there was so little information about you on the net. It caught my attention."

"Yeah, I started to figure that out myself a few weeks ago. It's why I finally let them put a picture of me on the clinic website and at the theater. I had been terrified someone would see me and think 'it's Kim'." The former redhead nodded.

"Good catch. Still, I only found you on the theater website." Shego supplied. "Anyway… you should have backstopped yourself better. What if one of your new friends gets curious and wants to Google you?"

"I was an orphan. Grew up in foster homes. Social care, all that." Kim waved her free hand. "You know how a public records search goes when you're a ward of the state?"

"Look, I'm not going to tell anyone you're alive. Really." Shego glared at the fifty caliber barrel. "It was just a ploy to get my questions answered."

After a long moment, Kim lowered the gun and sat back to the window sill again. "Good, because ammo for this thing is three bucks a pop. Totally harsh."

Swallowing once more, Shego tried to be flippant, "Gee, is that what I'm worth to you?"

"With the exchange rate? About…" Kim smirked darkly.

"So, you'll never come back?" Shego was certain now that this new Kim might be more fun in some ways, but there was a seriously unstable edge about her that the mercenary did not like.

"I doubt it, really." Kim sat the gun down and abandoned her half-sipped beer. " Buuuuut… if I HAVE to.. for some reason… Amy gave me an injector. It will turn my skin back in about a week, and all I have to do is dye my hair back on my own, and it will start growing in red."

"And what do you think about her army of evil mutant magic monkey ninja-men?"

"Eh, let her and Yamanouchi fight it out. Amy doesn't want anything more than her boyfriend back. As long as she doesn't come up here I really don't care."

Shego frowned. She wondered how much of this attitude was the stress Kim had described, which was, well, beyond anything Shego could fathom. There were no studies done on the effects of being an actual messiah after all… And how much of it might be attributed to whatever Amy had done to her…. And just how much of it was some kind of delayed teenage rebellion.

"Well… alright. As long as you've got some kind of out." Shego slowly stood. She had better odds as long as Kim wasn't holding the gun, but still, they weren't odds she wanted to test. "Seriously, I am not going to tell anyone. I don't need that kind of guilt trip on me. I remember at least a little of what you talked about.

"A little?"

"I'm a selfish green bitch who lives in her own little world. Like I gotta care that much?"

"Okay, I'll give you that. Now. Get out of town. I'm sure you're not up here legally, and if you're still north of the border by dawn, I'll call the RCMP."

"Glad to know you're still a law abiding citizen there, Mimmy…" Shego growled and took her beer, downing it and climbing back out the window onto the fire escape. "See you around, Cupcake."

"Not if you know what's good for you, you won't. The skin and hair weren't the only modifications."

Shego left before she could see whether or not Kim's eyes morphed into cat's eyes, and decided it was just better to not know.

* * *

_Based on a challenge issued by __**NoDrog**__ on KP Slash Haven._


End file.
